Your online staff profile

Find out how to update and improve your staff profile.

Benefits of a good profile

A good online staff profile can boost your reputation, improve your web presence and increase your chances of getting more funding and exposure.

Having a good Sussex profile, compared with just your own website, is useful because:

  • you can be found in the search bar on sussex.ac.uk and appear in lists on school and department pages
  • if you’re an academic, you can feature in prospectus pages, which helps students find potential supervisors in their areas of interest
  • detailed Sussex profiles may appear high up on the first page of Google’s search results.

Your profile should speak clearly to everyone – even highly intelligent people prefer to read plain English online. People skim read online content and often only read about a quarter of the words on a web page.

What to do as a minimum

Keep your profile as succinct as possible and stick to your academic work.

As a minimum, you should:

  • upload a high-quality picture of yourself
  • include a sentence about your background
  • sum up your research.

How to update your profile

How you update your profile depends on whether you're academic or professional services staff.

Academic staff

If you’re a member of academic staff at Sussex – such as a lecturer or researcher – you update your profile using Elements (you’ll need to log in).

Professional services staff

You update your profile using Sussex Direct (open in new window).

Depending on your role at Sussex, you’ll see different menu items.

Main profile page

This is your front (and possibly only) page.

It outlines your:

  • post (top-level official job title, managed by Human Resources)
  • other posts (usually a research group association, normally managed by a school administrator)
  • location (edit this in Sussex Direct – go to Personal > Job > Your University Address > Edit)
  • email (managed by IT Services and cannot be changed)
  • personal homepage (a link to your own website in Sussex Direct – go to Personal > Contact Information and edit the contact information box. Make sure the link text is meaningful – e.g, name of research centre)
  • telephone numbers.
Career details

Your front page contains the following career information.

Ignore the Research Interests and Publications List buttons.

Photograph

Your profile picture helps prospective students imagine what it's like to study at Sussex.

Your picture should be in colour and evenly lit. Avoid busy backgrounds and plain walls. Don't use holiday photos.

Edit your picture in Sussex Direct. Go to Personal > Personal Details and choose Upload Photo.

Your picture must be a high-quality JPG (preferably about 1MB in size) for processing through the IT system. You may need to change your privacy settings to show it.

The University's photographer is available for photo shoots. Contact your school administrator for this. If you want to take your own photo, read our photography principles.

Sub-sections of your profile

Depending on your role and level of experience, you may have other parts to your profile.

Help

If you have concerns about how your profile could be used by the media, email the communications team: press@sussex.ac.uk.

If you have any text formatting issues or need help with editing tools and you are:

If you have any other questions about your staff profile, email elements@sussex.ac.uk.


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